ferrets
When I was callow I thought nature hid
things like ferrets. Hob and gill,
they were here when the Romans lived,
rampant through the medieval borders,
dying on the roads if their keepers lost them,
rutting with the wild polecat
to make blind and skinhead litters.
Of deadly cynical albino stock they come,
gangsters from the womb.
Their pink-red eyes are malice-holes,
they possess no knowledge of love
or its power to tame. Their sexual lives
are merely clockwork hunger mountings,
coming round like a peasant's supper.
All they know are the soft bundles
they rip, glutted to the eyeballs.
When they dig out the rabbit-holes
the bucks may stand and fight
while their does are pelting
to a quicker death in the snapper-traps
or from the farmer's indifferent gun.
I saw one full of rabbit
get up on a stump and bite
a feathered mess of blue-tit
swinging from a bread-bag.
My grandfather kept one pampered in a hutch,
fed twice a day on sops, rabbit and fowl liver.
He muzzled the spoilt killer
by looping and knotting twine about its snout
or the thing would have bit off a finger.
You can only stop it acting terrible
by pressing a thumb just above the eyes
which can almost put it to sleep
and prevent its mad career through the world.
I knew of a farmer's son who clutched one
beneath his shirt and next to his skin
and sent it into a garage to kill a rat.
That rat was big and king of his crowd
but a sparrow against a hawk,
torn in seconds to a crimson shredded strip.
Even when the boy had flung his pet
in a reinforced aluminium sack,
still it was biting, teeth gnashing and jaws working
for more taste of the recent turbulence.
Long carrion land-eels, they can wriggle
through insect spaces to their meat, move like grease,
worth a pack of Russells, and equal
to the weasel and stoat, their brothers in stink.
Old guests at the coronation of foulness,
law cannot silence them extinct, or remove their talent.
Too late to complain of their peculiar skill
in the sad landscape.
Page(s) 98-99
magazine list
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